ew announcements could give greater pleasure to followers of the broad church of African literature than that of the East African-born novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah as winner of this year\u2019s Nobel Prize in Literature. We would all like to give the honorific Swahili greeting shikamoo \u2013 \u201cI touch your feet\u201d \u2013 but we can\u2019t do that literally right now, and he wouldn\u2019t like it anyway, I reckon, being a very self-effacing man, despite his great talent.<\/p>\n
Born in 1948 on Zanzibar, then still a British colony, Gurnah came to the United Kingdom in 1968. This was the year of Enoch Powell\u2019s \u201cRivers of Blood\u201d speech and four years after the violent Zanzibar revolution that eventually led to the union of Zanzibar and Tanganyika as present-day Tanzania \u2013 a moment later dramatized in his debut novel, Memory of Departure (1987). He studied at Canterbury Christ Church University and earned a PhD at the University of Kent in 1982, before teaching for a few years at a university in northern Nigeria. He then returned to Kent, rising through troublesome academic ranks to become Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, until his retirement in November 2018, an occasion on which I was honoured to give a valedictory lecture. At the end of that peroration, I rashly predicted the likelihood of Nobel laurels. The best bet I never made. Gurnah\u2019s academic work during this period, like that of his fellow laureate J. M. Coetzee, focused on colonial and post-colonial writing \u2013 branching out, when the field went mainstream, into some creative-writing tuition.<\/p>\n
All through this time \u2013 the early part of which saw post-colonial writing going against the grain of predominantly white, neocolonial establishment authority \u2013 Gurnah was writing groundbreaking fiction. To date, he has produced ten novels that grapple with the subjects of the immigrant experience, displacement, memory and colonialism. These concerns \u2013 the transnational, the trauma narrative \u2013 are very current now, but they were just a speck on the horizon when Gurnah began developing his oeuvre. He was a prime mover in this respect, and that is part of what has catalysed this award. As the chair of the Nobel committee, Anders Olsson, remarked, \u201cGurnah has consistently and with great compassion penetrated the effects of colonialism in East Africa, and its effects on the lives of uprooted and migrating individuals\u201d.<\/p>\n
This element of compassion was clearly an important factor for the Nobel committee.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> (subscription).<\/p>\n 'With … the elegance of his writing, and his vigilance to ethical issues, without tub-thumping, it is clear why Abdulrazak Gurnah is this year\u2019s rightful Nobel laureate.' (@FodenGiles<\/a>) https:\/\/t.co\/QU4mblqikg<\/a><\/p>\n — The TLS (@TheTLS) October 13, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n